Michael B. Jordan has revealed he went to therapy after playing Killmonger in Marvel movie Black Panther.
Jordan’s Erik Killmonger is considered one of the best MCU villains, with his performance opposite the late Chadwick Boseman’s T'Challa / Black Panther winning plaudits from critics and fans alike. Killmonger is a Wakandan prince raised in Oakland, California, after his father, N'Jobu, was killed by King T'Chaka. A brilliant black-ops operative and former U.S. Navy SEAL, Killmonger seeks revenge on Wakanda for abandoning his father and aims to use its vibranium to arm oppressed people worldwide, eventually challenging T'Challa for the throne.
But it was a role that clearly took its toll on Jordan, who told CBS Sunday Morning that he needed therapy to help shake off the character after the movie came out in 2018.
"Each character kind of lives with you. They don’t go anywhere. They’re there," Jordan said. "Some piece of that character… it’s a blurred line between yourself and the character, for me, anyway. With Killmonger, Erik, it was a complex, layered antagonist. I don’t look at him as a villain. I look at him as an antagonist, because you understood him a bit. He was the other side of a conversation. Him and T'Challa were a lot alike, they both cared about their people, deeply, and would do anything to protect them. They just had two different approaches and strategies and mentalities around it all, shaped by their childhood trauma.
"And Erik didn’t really know a lot of love. Erik didn’t experience that. He had a lot of betrayal. He had a lot of failed systems around him that shaped him, and his anger and his frustration, and looking at history and how it seemed to always repeat itself, and how was he going to break that cycle?
“So for a while in preparation for that role, I didn’t really speak to my family that much. I was kind of isolated a bit. I went to my hole and tried to live like he would have lived for a bit, whatever that process was. After the movie, it kind of stuck with me for a bit. Went to therapy, talked about it, found a way to kind of just decompress. I think at that point, I was still learning that I needed to decompress from a character.
“Again, there’s no blueprint to this. There wasn’t a lot of people that… acting is a solo journey a lot of times. There’s a lot of auditioning by yourself, practicing by yourself. There’s a lot of preparation and the experience, the journey. So learning as I went, I [realized] that, ‘Oh man, I still got a little something on me that I need to get off.’ You know, talking is really important.”
Jordan went on to say that seeking therapy is “necessary for people, especially men.” “I think it’s good for them to go and talk and get that off,” he added. “That’s something I’m not ashamed of at all and very proud of. It definitely helped me throughout the years and to this day, of trying to be a good communicator and well-rounded person inside and out.”
Jordan went on to reprise his role as Donnie Creed in Creed III, which he also directed, and play twin brothers Elijah "Smoke" Moore and Elias "Stack" Moore in 2025’s hit horror movie, Sinners.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
